Telepresence and similar video conferencing services have specific network requirements in order to function as intended. This is primarily because they introduce so called “rich media” characteristics, such as high definition audio and video that have stringent quality of service criteria. If these criteria are not met by the network infrastructure, then the end users will experience a degraded service which is course undesirable. For example, a highly important telepresence meeting may fail to establish or may suffer audio or video distortion of some form that makes the telepresence meeting unsatisfactory to the participants.
When a problem develops with a telepresence meeting, intervention is required by the appropriate support organization, e.g., a company information technology (IT) department. Current trouble shooting techniques for telepresence systems are purely reactive, i.e., the problem during a telepresence meeting has already happened and the meeting participants are inevitably inconvenienced. A better solution would be to pre-empt any problems in advance of the telepresence meeting and thus proactively manage telepresence equipment to avoid technical problems during a scheduled telepresence meeting.